Following a few months of research and writing about energy, climate change and future scenarios for Higher Education, I’m pleased to write that Richard Hall and I have recently had two workshop proposals accepted based on the idea of ‘Resilient Education’. There are minor differences between the two workshops, based on the anticipated participants, but the outline below, accepted for the ALTC2010 conference, is broadly representative of both. We’re hoping that we’ll not only raise awareness about the possible impacts of Peak Oil and the recently introduced Climate Change Act on the form and provision of Higher Education, but also learn from participants about ways that the sector might become more resilient to the the legislative, economic, societal and technological impacts that we face.
Is Higher Education’s use of technology making it more ‘efficiently unsustainable’?
When we speak of ‘sustainability’, what is it that we wish to sustain? In a future of climate change, energy depletion and low or no economic growth, what will Higher Education look like? Will our institutions and the current form of educational provision survive? This workshop will encourage participants to imagine and work towards a more ‘resilient education’.
This session will provide an opportunity for both non-academic and academic staff to discuss Higher Education, its institutions, curricula and pedagogies, in the light of two external impacting factors: Climate Change and fossil fuel depletion. HEIs are significant energy consumers. Increasingly both pedagogy and the curriculum are aided and delivered through the use of ICT. University floor space is increasing to accommodate growing numbers of students. In a near-future scenario of energy scarcity, which impacts both the reliability and availability of affordable energy, as well as the need to radically shift to the use of renewable energy and extreme efficiencies, we ask: “How resilient are our educational institutions?”
The workshop facilitators (Joss Winn, Lincoln, Dr. Richard Hall, De Montfort) will explain a near-future scenario in which the impacts of climate change and energy depletion on Higher Education are apparent. After a Q & A session, clarifying the scenario for participants, small groups will be challenged to ‘Think the Unthinkable’ and develop responses relating to the business continuity of their institutions and the continued provision of quality research, teaching and learning in an environment where absolute emissions are reduced by 80%. Participants will be encouraged to consider the most radical solutions including massive reform of curricula and the disestablishment of the national institutional model.
“It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to a low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply. What is needed is nothing short of an energy revolution.” (IEA World Energy Outlook 2008 http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/)
A few posts I read this morning seem to complement each other by showing how inadequate the current political and economic climate (pardon the pun) is for meeting the targets set out in the UK’s Climate Change Act 2008.
It’s not unusual to find reports calling for the need to tackle climate change with the kind of national attention and effort that was mobilised around World War II. A good example is a recent report from the The Royal Academy of Engineering, Generating the Future. A report on UK energy systems fit for 2050. I’ll have more to say about the report in another post, but they join the chorus of experts referring to the Act as “a huge challenge”, arguing that nothing less than our entire manufacturing base needs to shift focus and be “on a war footing”, if we are to meet the targets set out in the Act.
Last night, Ed Milliband was challenged during the Guardian’s Climate Debate over Roger Pielke Jnr. paper which argues that to meet the Climate Change Act’s targets for decarbonisation, the equivalent of 30 nuclear power stations would have to be built before 2015. Pielke’s position is that the Climate Change Act was always doomed to fail and that Milliband or whoever succeeds him will have to face up to it sooner or later.
So given the “huge challenge” (or delusion if you agree with Pielke Jnr.), what would it mean to be “on a war footing” in order to address the targets set out in the Act?
In a post yesterday, Stuart Staniford (one of my favourite energy/environment blogger analysts), notes that in 1943, the UK was spending 55% of GDP on the war. His source, the Cambridge Economic History of Great Britain, states that UK expenditure on the war went from 7% of GDP in 1938, to 53% in 1941, to 55% in 1943. So, in economic terms, that is what being “on a war footing” means. Half of national productivity is mobilised towards a single goal.
However, again in yesterday’s news we find that the UK’s annual deficit is the highest since records began in 1946, or as Edmund Conway in The Telegraph puts it this morning, we’re already experiencing a “war-sized” annual public deficit (overdraft) of £163.4bn (or 11.5% of GDP). Perhaps we should take some comfort in the Guardian’s Data Blog which shows that public debt (the accumulation of deficits) currently stands at 63.6% of GDP, far from the 250% of 1946.
This would suggest that if we are to shift our entire manufacturing base towards decarbonisation, as The Royal Academy of Engineering thinks we should, then Ann Pettiford’s argument for mobilising (I guess that includes educating/training) a “‘carbon army’ of ‘green-collar’ jobs”, through additional borrowing would seem to fit quite nicely into this apparently necessary vision of a ‘war on carbon’ (my phrase). For people working in education, it might be a useful exercise to consider what tertiary education might look like if half of national productivity was directed towards meeting the Climate Change Act, a law that each of us in the UK is bound too, after all.
The problem I have with all of this talk of war and climate change, aside from the hot air and inaction, is along the lines of what George Monbiot, in his book, Heat, has to say on the matter. That is, the enemy is no other than ourselves.
Most environmentalists – and I include myself in this – are hypocrites … I would like to believe that the changes I suggest could be achieved by appealing to people to restrain themselves. But though some environmentalists, undismayed by the failure of the past forty years of campaigning, refuse to see it, self-enforced abstinence alone is a waste of time . . . I have sought to demonstrate that the necessary reduction in carbon emissions is – if difficult – technically and economically possible. I have not demonstrated that it is politically possible. There is a reason for this. It is not up to me to do so. It is up to you . . . The campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.
I would add though that the enemy is not simply ‘ourselves’ – you, me, us – but capital’s laws of motion that have been turning since the late seventeenth century. We might find some comfort in reading that there is nothing natural about these laws of motion – there are alternatives – yet in another post I read this morning, it looks like the enemy has already won.
Nick Jackson, a computing student and part-time member of ICT staff, has developed lncn.eu, a University of Lincoln branded service for shortening links. Read all about it here. Be sure to read the comments to get a good idea of how he intends to improve the service.
This little project was in response to reading Bernie’s blog post about how a student wanted to use short links in his dissertation.
I see that Nick’s in contact with the Internet Archive’s 301Works to guarantee long-term sustainability of the links, too.
I’ve written before about how I used EPrints as a back end for WordPress, which was a front end for some OERs which are aimed at anyone wanting to learn how to sketch. I didn’t really know where I was going with it, but it worked out OK. I’ve also written about how WordPress can be used for scholarly publishing with the addition of a few plugins. In that post, I showed how I deposited my MA Dissertation into EPrints via RSS from WordPress. I’m going to take a similar approach with the OERs we’ve created for the ChemistryFM project, using the repository as canonical storage and WordPress as a front end for the course. I think that for these reasons, I was asked to provide a brief ‘position paper’ for next week’s JISC CETIS event on repositories and the open web. ((The distinction between the open web and the social web isn’t very clear on the CETIS event page. I think that the open web is not necessarily social and that the social web is not necessarily open. For me, the open web refers to a distributed web built on open source and open standards like HTML, RSS, RDF, OAuth, OpenID. Although the two are converging, Twitter for example is not as good an example as Status.net in terms of the open web, but a better example of the social web in terms of its uptake.))
My position is pretty straight forward really. I don’t think it’s worth developing social features for repositories when there is already an abundance of social software available. It’s a waste of time and effort and the repository scene will never be able to trump the features that the social web scene offers and that people increasingly expect to use. The social web scene is largely market driven (people working in profit making companies develop much of the social web software) and without constantly innovating, businesses fail. Repositories, on the whole, are not developed for profit and do not need to innovate for the sake of something new that will drive revenue. That is a good position to be in. Why change it? When repositories start competing for features with social web software, it is the beginning of the end for them.
EPrints offers versioned storage for the preservation of digital objects and a rich amount of data in a number of formats can be harvested and exported from each EPrint. The significance of the software is the exposure of its data to Google, as you will see from looking at the web analytics for any repository.
In thinking about how to join EPrints to the social web, I’ve toyed with the idea of a socialrepo, where WordPress harvests one or more feeds from the repository. With a little design work, WordPress could be the defacto front end for the repository providing all the social features of a mature blogging platform.
We’ve also commissioned a couple of plugins for EPrints that extends the reach both to and from EPrints. The first is a simple widget that can be placed on any web page and provides a way for a member of staff to upload a paper to their EPrints workspace. The second is an XML-RPC plugin that allows you to post a summary of your EPrint to your blog at the end of the deposit process so that the item can be advertised in a place more meaningful to you than an institutional repository and discussed alongside all your other academic blogging.
As I’ve shown with my own dissertation, EPrints can consume RSS feeds and if we want to add social web compatibility to EPrints, why not focus on improving the ingest process so that data can be harvested from the feed to populate the cataloguing fields? And while we’re at it, recall that the social web is rich in multimedia. EPrints could be much improved in how it ingests multimedia and the batch editing functionality that is essential when dealing with hundred of images, for example. Much could be done on the inside of EPrints, but on the outside, EPrints is an excellent example of the open web but a poor example of the social web. But let’s not beat ourselves up about it. The social web thrives on the technologies of the open web. Give it what it needs to thrive and make it easier for users to feed the beast.
During some quiet time in the office last week, I decided to install Ubuntu 10.4 on my work desktop. It’s a nice 2009 24″ iMac and during the install process I was reminded of the first time I installed Linux ten years ago, which was also on an iMac (‘Summer 2000‘ model). It goes without saying that Linux on the desktop has come a long way, but it wasn’t until this particular version of Ubuntu that I would confidently say that it’s as hassle-free and useful as running OS X or Windows. For me, Linux is a better experience than either of them.
The first time I installed Linux in July 2000, I sent off for a CD of PPC Linux (no longer in business). USB support was experimental, which was a bit of a problem for Mac users, as Apple had switched to USB as their main type of connector. I spent many hours compiling experimental USB drivers from source. I stuck with the PPC Linux distro for a few months, but then SUSE released a much more polished version of Linux for the PowerPC and I switched to that. There were still problems with running Linux on a Mac and Linux desktop applications were still relatively immature but I was happy to use that for a couple of years until SUSE dropped support for the PowerPC chip. Then, around mid-2001, I made the leap to Debian, traditionally a distro for hardcore Linux users and stepped up my game a bit by running the bleeding-edge ‘unstable’ version – I think it was called ‘Sid’ at the time.
Debian was cool and I ran it on my old iMac until March 2007 at which point it was time to move on. I removed the hard-drive, smashed it with a hammer and then placed the whole machine in the bin before hitting the road and never looking back (more or less).
A couple of months later, I bought my first laptop with Linux pre-installed. The Lenovo N100 is a well supported and well built machine – the display doesn’t flop about in the wind like on some cheap laptops. On the whole, Ubuntu on the Lenovo was pretty good although the brightness control never did seem to work very well. When I was given a Dell D430 laptop at work, I took the ‘pesky penguin’ as my wife calls Linux (Lord only knows why!?), off the Lenovo, and offered the Lenovo up to her. No more trouble and strife.
Still with me? Well, as soon as I was given the Dell (about a year ago), I wiped the corporate install of XP (sorry ICT colleagues, but I never have to hassle you for support now, which I would if I was running Windows) and made it a single boot Ubuntu machine. I love this little laptop. Everything works.
Anyhow, the real test was last week when I installed Ubuntu Lucid beta 2 on both the Dell and the iMac. It’s remarkable. Faster than OS X for the applications I use and it uses less RAM overall, too. Ubuntu has ditched the brown theme (about time!) and have adopted a dark default theme with hints of purple. Sounds awful doesn’t it? But it looks slick and everything works great.
Ten years later, with my hand on my heart, I can say the ‘journey’ was worth it. Let it be known, Linux on the Desktop has arrived. I think it’s time that all Educational Technologists in every corner of the world, took a Linux CD to their corporate machine and showed it what a real OS looks like. I guarantee that your day will be more interesting. 😉
For much of my life, I’ve taken leaps from one interest to a seemingly unrelated other. As a kid, life was just a chronic habit of fads that my parents endured with some amusement. In my late teens, I slowed down and have managed to extend my interests over a period of years rather than weeks or months.
Typically, if I have a mild interest in something, I’ll buy a book. Even in these days of the web, an interest is not ‘christened’ until I’ve got a book on the subject in my hands. Here are the pivotal books that marked turning points for me with a brief explanation of why. I’d be interested if anyone else can plot their life in this way.
Incredibly Strange Films
Jonathan Ross presented a series called ‘The Incredibly Strange Film Show‘. It was the high point of his career, if you ask me, and came into my life out of nowhere. I dropped out of college to watch films and work in a video shop. Had I missed this series, I might have ended up being a Civil Engineer.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
For some reason, I don’t remember why, I left the video shop to study Journalism in London. By the time I ‘qualified’, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a hack. Besides, at the age of 19, I knew nothing about the world. How was I supposed to write about it? I returned home with no plans and picked up this book that my dad was reading. It totally captured me, so I decided to apply to university to study Buddhism. Up to that point, I had no aspirations to go to university and was the first person in my extended family to do so. I got a 1st Class degree because I loved the subject and won funding to study for an MA in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan. I studied Japanese, practised Zen for four years, living for a while across the road from a Zen temple in London, and spent a summer in a Japanese Zen monastery. I went on to live in Japan for three years. All because of this book.
Independent filmmaking
Towards the end of my MA, Buddhism had become entirely academic for me and I’d lost the deeply personal motivation that I had for it. Keen to complete my MA and move on, I looked for a distraction to see me through the last few months of study and picked up this book. I borrowed filmmaking equipment from the university and taught myself how to use an edit suite before heading off to Japan for three years. While I was in Japan, I ran a monthly cinematheque for experimental film and video called Eiga Arts and organised exchanges of experimental film and video between Japanese and international filmmakers. It was a blast but it wasn’t going to pay the rent so when I returned to the UK, I studied for an MA in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia. It’s been paying the rent ever since. I was also able to use a lot of the film I’d shot while in Japan and the US to partially meet the requirements for my MA.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
While in Japan, I had the money to buy a nice new iMac. It came with OS 9 installed, which constantly crashed. I got so frustrated having spent nearly $2000 on on a computer that didn’t work, that I looked for alternatives and found Linux. This was ten years ago and while support for Intel-based desktop computers was still fairly hit and miss, support for Apple machines was a niche within a niche. Still, I persevered and over the course of a year, learned my way around a Unix/Linux OS. It’s the only time I’ve ever worked on something all night. Repeatedly. Learning about the Open Source movement was unavoidable and I picked up this book and knew I’d made the right decision, despite the huge learning curve. It gave social and political significance to a simple act borne out of frustration. I’ve been running Linux on my desktop for over ten years now and have a basic certification in Linux SysAdmin. Open Source opened the door for me to the Commons.
Shelter
After finishing my MA in Film Archiving, I landed a job as Moving Image Archivist, with the British Film Institute. I stayed there for a couple of years until I saw that Amnesty International were advertising for an Audiovisual Archivist. The focus at Amnesty was on digital archiving and Digital Asset Management and so I found myself moving into the more general profession of Information Management. The problem with this, for me, was that I became removed from the physical aspects of film. It was all bits and bytes, storage and standards. After a couple of years at Amnesty, London was feeling oppressive and we saw no future for us there. I got talking to my Mum and Dad about how we could help each other out and we decided to build a house in their garden (my Dad was a builder but he died before we got planning permission). The deal was that we got the land for free (so making the whole thing affordable), and with 30 years or so of earning ahead of us, we’d look out for them financially as they headed for retirement. We wanted to build something modest but exceptional and I bought this book which is still a huge inspiration to me. It’s full of illustrated stories of people that have built their own, often mad, places to live. As it happened, planning restrictions meant that we had to build a fairly conventional stone cottage style place, which is great, but I still have aspirations to build a geodesic dome or a house raised on poles some day.
Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
Between March 2007 and February 2008, we had a baby daughter, moved to Lincoln two weeks after she was born, got married and built a house. I was also lucky to spot an advertisement for a job working part-time on a JISC funded repository project at the University of Lincoln, which connected nicely with my work on digital archiving at Amnesty and my interest in the Commons. When the project ended, I applied for the job I’m in now, as Technology Officer, looking at how technology might be used to support research, teaching and learning. I love it. Last summer, I started to think about the problems of technology and one that seemed obvious to me was the relationship between energy consumption and technology and how a future energy crisis and climate change legislation might impact the use of technology in Higher Education. It’s an area of research that I’m still pursuing, but the most significant effect it’s had on me is to open my eyes to the political dimensions of energy and the economy. Holloway’s book was suggested to me and it had a similar effect as reading the book on Zen. In particular, the first chapter which talks about ‘The Scream’, resonates for me with the central Buddhist idea of suffering. There have been other connections, too, not least the metaphysical aspects of Marxist theory, which often remind me of the metaphysical aspects of religious philosophy.
Last Tuesday, I attended the Roundhouse Conference on Critical Theory and Education, organised by students at the University of Leeds, who run Roundhouse: A Journal of Critical Theory and Practice. It was a great, inspiring day that reminded me of what it was like to be a student ((It’s been ten years since Graduate School and I don’t have much contact with students in my current role)) and why students are well-placed to affect change in universities, whether it’s pressure from the outside or covertly from the inside.
Rather than simply moaning, there was some good negative critique about the role of universities with both staff and students shifting between anger, despair and inspired subversion of the neo-liberal agenda.
A few things in particular caught my attention on the day. The first followed Mike Neary’s talk during ‘The State of Pedagogy and the University’ session. He referred to the ‘student as producer‘ and this phrase kept returning throughout the day as staff and students seemed to like it. The conference itself was a good example of student/staff collaboration and there were no apparent hierarchies in the running of the day. Students were more than capable of organising, moderating and running a day-long session that critically discussed pedagogy, the role of the university and how it might be transformed.
Secondly, the current industrial dispute at Leeds over job cuts, was a recurring theme during the round table discussions over the course of the day. This helped ground the theoretical critique in a real crisis that staff and students at Leeds are actually part of.
Thirdly, there was a discussion about parallelism, with one of the speakers saying that there was no hope of meaningful reform and that the time has come to contemplate the end of the university as a site of critical thinking. He argued that by remaining within the university, we collude in our own oppression and suggested that new autonomous spaces needed to be created apart from the agenda of neo-liberal education. There was some sympathy with this view, although another speaker referred to the time when Charles Clarke questioned the state funding of Medieval History in favour of subjects that benefit the economy. The point being made was that parallelism would still serve the interests of the State by removing the responsibility of funding ‘uneconomic’ subjects. In effect, parallelism would act as a form of efficiency under the neo-liberal agenda.
Finally, I was really pleased to hear about a couple of student run initiatives at Leeds:
I hope they can keep this running as it sounds like there’s pressure to close it down.
The most inspiring aspect of the day for me was learning about The Really Open University, which “sets out to change the expectations that people have of university life, and by extension the rest of our lives.” The conference was leafleted with a recent copy of The Sausage Factory [PDF], describing their launch.
The public launch of ROU took place on March 2nd, when over fifty students, staff and members of the larger community came together to discuss, ‘What is a Really Open University?’ This group was brought together by a recognition of the need for alternatives to the current educational system which puts everything – teaching, learning, our daily lives – up for sale, and makes efficiency drives such as the current budget cuts seem inevitable. Through a collective and participatory process, this group developed several vision statements about what education without restraints would look like.
The Really Open University website has opened my eyes to how students are using the web for education-related activism. The Really Open Union site is a good example that brings together initiatives elsewhere. I agree with Leon’s comment on the Roundhouse blog that The Really Open University is a good example of putting theory into action and should be supported.
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